High winds pummel Sisters Country

The wind roared out of the west on New Year's Day to pummel the Sisters Country with gusts that reached into the 50-miles-per-hour range, breaking or uprooting trees and causing widespread power outages.

Some 500 households lost power in the Cloverdale and Plainview area and crews from Central Electric Cooperative were so busy scrambling to repair downed lines across the region that it took hours in many cases to restore power.

Brynne Beverly, office manager at Hoodoo Mountain Resort, reported that a wind gust of 101.6 mph was recorded at the top of the mountain Thursday morning.

"The winds have just been horrible this past week," she said.

Katy Yoder, a freelance reporter for The Nugget, lost a couple of trees on her property east of Sisters and she and several neighbors suffered wind damage to their roofs.

"We had four houses on Fryrear Ranch Road that lost parts of roofs," she said. "The great thing was, there were roofers coming out and offering help out here yesterday, which was great."

A roof was reportedly blown off a barn on Hurtley Ranch Road.

Yoder said, that "there's numerous trees down on our street, too. There's juniper trees down all over the place."

Junipers seemed to bear the brunt of the damage.

"Most of it was juniper trees this time around," said Dave Vitelle of Bear Mountain Fire, who had crews out dealing with downed trees all day on Thursday and was still working on them on Friday.

Vitelle estimated that there were at least 70 trees down in the Cloverdale and Gist Road area.

Vitelle said that trees uprooted where the ground had steady sun exposure and had thawed out to a spongy condition.

"If we'd had a lot of warm weather for a week before this, we'd have lost a heck of a lot more trees," he said.

Some ponderosa pines lost branches or broke entirely. One small ponderosa broke and fell onto the laundry facility at Sisters Mobile Home Park. As of Friday, the tree could not be removed because CEC had not been able to respond to deal with downed wires, Vitelle reported.

The tree landed flat and did not appear to have penetrated the roof. No one was reported injured.

Winds returned on Monday, but were less severe than the New Year's Day windstorm.

Author Bio

Jim Cornelius, Editor in Chief

Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.

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